Contents

Introduction:

In the pursuit of constructing truly autonomous mobile robots, the simultaneous localization and mapping problem is considered as one of the most important problems. Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the process by which a mobile robot can build a map of an unknown environment and at the same time use this map to compute its location. SLAM is considered as a chicken-egg problem as to identify a robots location the map is needed which the robot is still building. One classical solution to the
SLAM problem is the EKF-SLAM method. EKF-SLAM uses Kalman filter, which is an efficient recursive filter that estimates the internal state of a linear dynamic system from a series of noisy measurements. Goal of this project is to implement and simulate the EKF-SLAM method for solving the SLAM problem.

How the project works:

Overview of the project is shown here:

Detailed process is explained below:

1. Observe and associate landmarks:

For simplicity, I assumed true data association. That means whenever the robot sees a landmark it knows which landmark is this. Each landmark has id. Landmarks are stored in an array. If landmark with id n is not in the landmark array, it is added to the array.

2. Predict next state using on odometry:

The robots state is defined as X = [ x y theta]

Here, x = x component of robot’s position

y= y component of robot’s position

theta = robot's orientation

The robot’s initial uncertainty is defined as P, which is a 3X3 diagonal matrix.
The estimation of next state could be predicted using to following equation: